Those who clamour for peace in Ukraine at any price should remember that handing further territory to Vladimir Putin means condemning more Ukrainians to live under a totalitarian system that surpasses even Russia in terms of cruelty and oppression.
About 3.6 million Ukrainians already endure Russian occupation in the four oblasts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, none of which Putin controls entirely.
The first thing the FSB intelligence service does when Russia seizes a town is to establish a basement torture centre. The second is to alter the television tower so that their Russkiy Mir channel is the only one available.
Ukrainian journalist Viktoria Roshchyna paid with her life for attempting to document the Russian network of prisons and torture chambers. She was arrested near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in August 2023. When Russia finally sent her emaciated body back to Ukraine last February, her neck bore signs of strangulation. Her brain, eyes and larynx had been removed.
RM Block
Under Russian rule, Ukrainians are forced to accept Russian passports. Russian soldiers assault and rape women with impunity. Surveillance by the FSB is constant. At least 20,000 children have been abducted and taken to Russia for adoption. Children are taught to hate their own country and encouraged to join Russia’s Yunarmia youth military organisation. At age 18 they can be drafted into the Russian army, in violation of the Geneva Convention.
It is no longer possible to cross directly from the occupied territories into Ukraine. Those who wish to leave must have a valid Russian passport and undergo interrogation at filtration points on the Russian border. They then travel back to Ukraine via Belarus and Poland.
Two Ukrainian youths who escaped this year paint a chilling picture of life in the occupied territories. The interviews were organised by The Reckoning Project (TRP), an NGO staffed by international journalists and lawyers to collect evidence of Russian war crimes in the hope of prosecution. TRP has contributed to legal filings before the International Criminal Court and submitted evidence to UN bodies. The Irish Department of Foreign Affairs is a donor.
Karina (17), is from a small village on the outskirts of Mariupol, which was seized by Russia at the end of a three-month siege in 2022. She does not want her family name to be published because she still has relatives there.
Ivan Sarancha fled his native city of Luhansk on his 18th birthday last January. Sarancha did not tell his pro-Russian parents he was leaving.
Karina and her mother were interrogated for more than five hours at the crossing point between Luhansk and Russia.
“They did a very thorough check of our telephones: photographs, chats, restored deleted messages,” Karina says. “They told me it would be very bad for me if I didn’t tell the truth. We said we were going to Moscow. That was our cover. The officer found a deleted message to my brother saying I would be in Ukraine in a few days. I had to admit that I was travelling to Kyiv. I said I was going to Moscow first, so I wasn’t lying. I said I had to go to Kyiv to get a Ukrainian passport. He got very angry and asked why I needed a Ukrainian passport. I said it would be easier to study abroad.
“The officer kept asking why did I want to speak Ukrainian? Why did I need a Ukrainian passport? I didn’t cry but it was very difficult. I was very anxious. I couldn’t stand life under occupation any more.”
Karina had been an active high school student who performed in school functions before 2022. Russian soldiers are frequently brought to schools in the occupied territories to teach “bravery lessons” to children. Karina was ordered to read a poem at an event with four Russian soldiers. “I was told I would be in trouble if I didn’t do it. I went home and wept.”
Karina saw boys and girls as young as seven put on Russian army uniforms for shooting, army drills and field trips with Yunarmia. The youth organisation is under EU sanctions for “the militarisation of Ukrainian children”.
Girls are at particular risk. A teenager in Mariupol who was pro-Ukrainian and who posted online about her desire to leave was kidnapped by six Russian soldiers who took her to the forest and gang-raped her before killing her and dismembering her body. The girl was an acquaintance of Karina.
“I was walking home from school when two Russian soldiers started talking to me. They said, ‘Let’s meet’. I ignored them. They started grabbing me, touching me up. In broad daylight. I was very lucky because a man saw them and shouted, ‘What are you doing? Stop it.’ They let me go. This happened more than once. It never went as far as rape.”
Alluding to Karina’s experience, Lesia Pyniak, a TRP researcher, says women who are assaulted by Russian soldiers have no recourse. “There is no way to complain about it. There is no one to go to. You would simply be ignored. These girls are very vulnerable.”
Since July 31st Russia has imposed its state-controlled Max messaging platform on residents of the occupied territories, says Dr Jade McGlynn, who studies the occupied territories at King’s College London. The authorities advertise Max as a patriotic alternative to western apps, which are blocked. “Max enables state surveillance, metadata capture of communications and monitoring of anyone who engages with the occupation authorities,” McGlynn told the Ukraine: the Latest podcast.
All telephones sold in the occupied territories come pre-installed with software known locally as Ruben. “It allows for total surveillance of what you are doing,” McGlynn says. “Ruben can do facial recognition, check metadata, listen to what you say. During curfew FSB cars drive around and they are able to listen and track what’s happening inside homes to see which communication devices are connected to routers, make sure there are no devices that they don’t already have on their system. They can check who you speak to.”
When Karina purchased a telephone in Mariupol, she found strange pre-installed apps on it, which she deleted. “But I noticed abnormalities. When I looked at messages I hadn’t read yet, they had already been read. Danil, a boy at my school who really hated pro-Ukrainian people, hacked into my phone and downloaded all my banking information. He sent me a message saying, ‘I have all your data.’ Then he deleted everything on my phone. He added curses on khokhly, the pejorative name that Russians use for Ukrainians.”
Karina’s voice cracks only once during our long conversation. “I am very sorry for people forced to live there,” she says, “especially young girls living under threat of rape of violence”.
Ivan Sarancha planned his escape from Luhansk for nearly two years. His family had split between pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian factions. “There were family issues to begin with,” he says. “Our father was very strict.”
Ivan had no friends at a Russian-language school run by the “Luhansk People’s Republic”. He accepted his parents’ opinions until he was 12, when he started making friends in Ukraine through online gaming. “They were my age, my peers,” he says. “I love Ukraine. I love freedom.”
Ivan’s pro-Ukrainian views crystallised at the time of the full-scale invasion. He lived briefly in Moscow with his parents because they wanted him to have a Russian education. His online friends in Dnipro were telling him of Russian attacks. “My classmates in Moscow mocked me when I told them the war had started.”
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The family moved back to Luhansk in the summer of 2022 because his parents could not find work in Moscow. The invasion brought a large influx of Russians to Luhansk.
After the full-scale invasion, Ivan, like Karina, had to attend classes called Conversations about Important Things. “They brought speakers from Russia who told us about great defenders of the fatherland,” he says. “There were billboards in the city encouraging young people to join Yunarmia.”
One of Ivan’s teachers told him he would be drafted into the Russian army when he turned 18. “Fear of mobilisation was not the main reason I wanted to leave,” he says. “I just hated Russia and what was happening.”
If his plan to travel via Russia to Belarus and Ukraine had failed, Ivan intended to join the Russian army and surrender to Ukrainian troops. That would have been extremely dangerous, Pyniak says. She recounts the story of a former Ukrainian soldier in Kherson who did exactly that. “The Russians shoot deserters,” she says. “The soldier from Kherson is considered a collaborator. He is still held in a Ukrainian prisoner of war camp.”
Ivan re-entered Ukraine at the Makrany Domanove crossing, the last open border point between Belarus and Ukraine, carrying only a suitcase and a backpack. He stayed for a time in a refugee centre, found a job with the Save Ukraine NGO and has built a life for himself in Kyiv.
Will he ever return to Luhansk? I ask Ivan. “Only when it’s part of Ukraine,” he replies.
